new member to the IT world too

At the tender age of fifty odd i decided to have alook into computers, having never touched one before its a very steep learning curve.I've been at it two months now, built a couple, out of old bits and pieces with reasonable success and strange results at times. However as finances are very limited i have to try to improve my pc and my skills at a very slow pace.
the problem i'm facing now is having purchased a maxto 80GB hdd i find the old gigabyte GA 7IX 1999 vintage motherboard wont recognise it either as a slave drive or primary, with jumpers or cable select. Also when connected slave or master the pc will not go past the setup and shows "primary disc fail" Remove it and she fires up into windows as normal.is it the m/board, maxtor or(most likely ) me, cheers.